In September 2026, three papers by CREST PhD students received best paper awards: one by Louis de Lachapelle and Paul-Emmanuel Chouc in Rome, the other by Chloé Antoine in Dijon and lastly, Nina Stizi won the Best Master Thesis Award from FIR-PIR.

Louis de Lachapelle and Paul-Emmanuel Chouc – Best Paper Award, “Firm Dynamics, Investment and Aggregate Growth” conference (Rome)

Louis de Lachapelle (supervised by Bertrand Garbinti and Clément Malgouyres) and Paul-Emmanuel Chouc (supervised by Clément Malgouyres and Gabriel Zucman), both PhD students at CREST, received the Best Paper Award at the 2026 Doctoral Conference at Oxford University Centre for Business Taxation (CBT). The conference was held in Oxford on 14–15 September 2026.

Their paper, The Supply-Side Effects and Incidence of Investment Stimulus Policies, starts from a surprisingly under-studied question: when governments subsidize investment, what happens to the price of capital goods? The authors study the French “extra depreciation” scheme (suramortissement), in place from April 2015 to April 2017. It allowed firms to deduct an additional 40% of the cost of eligible industrial equipment, cutting the user cost of capital by about 13%.

Drawing on rich French administrative data, including production and price surveys, corporate tax returns and matched employer-employee records, they find that producers of eligible goods raised their domestic sales by about 11% and their prices by about 2.6%. As a result, in the context of this reform, value-based measures of investment overstate the actual expansion of physical capital by roughly 30%. Price increases absorb on average 20% of the subsidy, and as much as 30 to 40% when producers are dominant or capacity-constrained.

The policy nonetheless had real effects that spread along the supply chain. Beneficiary firms invested, sold and hired more, especially high-skilled workers. Upstream, capital goods producers scaled up their operations. The authors also estimate that capital producers captured at least 31% of the gains, mainly reflected in dividends and executive pay.

Chloé Antoine – FAERE Young Economist Best Paper Award 2026 (Dijon)

Chloé Antoine, a PhD student at CREST supervised by Jean-Marc Bourgeon and Gregory Corcos, received the FAERE Young Economist Best Paper Award 2026. This award goes each year to the best paper by young researchers presented at the annual conference of the French Association of Environmental and Resource Economists (FAERE). The 13th edition took place on 10–11 September 2026 at Université Bourgogne Europe in Dijon.

The award-winning paper is her job market paper, Agriculture, Trade and Biodiversity. It asks whether agricultural trade liberalization erodes biodiversity or can instead help preserve it. Chloé Antoine builds a Ricardian general-equilibrium model in which biodiversity both results from land use and feeds back into agricultural productivity. She quantifies it on data covering the whole world and more than 800,000 fields.

For birds, a key indicator of ecosystem health, her results show that trade has an overall protective effect. By specializing where production is most efficient and gaining cheaper access to fertilizers, pesticides and machinery, farmers produce more on less land, and the habitat this spares saves more species globally than more intensive farming costs. Observed liberalization spares about a dozen bird species from eventual global extinction. Reversing it would cost farmers at least $2.2 billion a year in agricultural sales, from the loss of bird ecosystem services alone. However, these aggregate gains are unevenly shared : production shifts towards biodiversity-rich tropical regions, and about a quarter of ecoregions lose species even as the global count improves.

Chloé Antoine was a Fulbright Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School from January to July 2026. She is on the 2026–2027 academic job market.

Nina Stizi – FIR-PIR Best Master Thesis Award 2026 (Paris)

Nina Stizi, a PhD student at CREST supervised by Gauthier Vermandel and Olivier-David Zerbib, received the FIR-PRI Best Master Thesis Award 2026. Each year, the French Sustainable Investment Forum (Forum pour l’Investiment Responsable, FIR) and the United Nations-backed Principles for Responsible Investment Initiative (PRI) network gather a panel of academics and financial practionners to recognize research excellence in sustainable finance on  a European scope. Its aim is to support academic research and foster relations and debates between academics and practioners. The Prize rewards European researchers in 5 categories, among which the Best Master’s Thesis. The 21st edition took place on 1 October 2026 at École des Mines in Paris.

Her Master’s thesis, Estimating the Contribution of Nature and Biodiversity in Production Functions, proposes a control-function based econometric approach to measure how much nature contributes to firm-level production and firm-specific productivity, and makes a preliminary empirical application on European agricultural data.

The perception of nature in economics has undergone a paradigmatic transformation: while nature used to be considered an essential production factor alongside capital and labor, it was relegated to the status of an externality, often perceived as unlimited after the end of World War II. This downgrading has led to a structural overestimation of the productivity of produced capital, while silently eroding the natural foundations of our prosperity. Measuring nature’s contribution to economic production is therefore both a scientific and political imperative, and a prerequisite for intergenerational sustainability.

Recent advances, such as the seminal Dasgupta Review (2021), have proposed to bridge the critical disconnect between economic development  and environmental sustainability by (re-)integrating natural capital at the very core of economics, that is in production functions. However, the contributions have remained mainly theoretical, and the few empirical estimation attempts were at an aggregate level, not at the firm-level. Meanwhile, measuring the role of nature-capital in firms’ production is a requirement to understanding their investment decision, the evolution of their productivity, and how much of their productivity decline is due to a degradation of ecosystem services.

This thesis offers an initial control-function based econometric response to this challenge, and attemps a first empirical application on European agricultural data collected in 30 countries between 2013 and 2020. The preliminary results suggest that produced capital is systematically overestimated in traditional accounting frameworks. The work stands as a call to researchers to bridge the gap between economic theory and ecological reality.

Nina Stizi was a research assistant at CREST when she wrote her Master’s thesis. She has recently started her second year as a PhD student.

 Congratulations to Louis, Paul-Emmanuel, Chloé, and Nina!